August 2024 — Reflections on Aura’s second retreat-based course, Midwifing the Feminine. 22 South African female activists gather at Bodhi Khaya four nights of deep communal nourishment — a pause from the relentless challenges of day-to-day activism.
In May, we held our first Aura retreat-based course — Facilitating the Feminine — at the Bertha Retreat, Boschendal in the Dwarsrivier Valley, Stellenbosch, South Africa. We were astonished to see the length of the waiting list — so this second retreat arose as a surprise, unplanned in our Be The Earth annual calendar.
What is it that this small offering seems to tap into? What calls women deeply engaged in very busy lives, with families, communities and working actively in significant areas of change?
There is a yearning in many of their responses to our invitation. Perhaps it is this yearning that triggers one in us: a yearning to create sanctuary. Rest. Time to be. Timelessness. A way of Aura serving Earth.
We made the decision to hold our second Aura retreat-based course in August, winter in South Africa. Again, five days — a substantial commitment of time for those used to having none. As with our first retreat, participants choose what they can pay, and no woman is turned away for lack of funds.
On the first day, there is a flurry of anxious messages. Roadworks on the N2 out of Cape Town. Traffic jams taking forever. Driver has not arrived. As if with the very effort of retreating comes a torrent of distractions.
In an exploitative world, insisting on endless effort, progress and achievement, the mere idea of retreat can seem weak. Stupid. Too radical. Subversive. Middle-class indulgence.
Becoming invisible to demands (one's own or another's) can bring a feeling of panic. Entrenched in patterns of suffering, the notion of removing oneself — momentarily — seems irrational.
It’s a long gravel road to Bodhi Khaya, this place of exquisite beauty. With 22 women arriving slowly, sorting baggage and bedrooms, we notice feelings of worry and anxiety that have arrived too. Will we be worthy of all these women’s time? Will what we offer, as simple as it is, be enough? Are we ourselves enough? And instantaneously, the Bodhi Khaya land answers back.
With the silence of a mountain, indigenous flora, huge labyrinth symbolising simultaneous exploration of inner and outer worlds, river water running loudly from recent heavy rains. The buildings are nestled in a small valley with lakes holding birdsong and butterflies. A vast meditation room, floor cushions, and fires on either side. The warmth of decades of loving, attentive care exudes from every brick in this place, and its more-than-human world present in every breath.
The vegetarian food is greeted with joy and also deep scepticism. It’s pure energy food, of a very rare quality, much of it grown in the gardens outside. Still, we worry that five days without meat will prove too much for our circle.
And slowly, gently, inexorably, the land starts weaving spells. In a femininity beyond words, our circle of women is formed. Spaciousness, silence, walking barefoot, laughing, telling stories. Weeping.
Exploring cycles of nature, connecting with a more-than-human world, wondering about the differences between midwifing and facilitation. Midwifing is being present, and letting go. Noticing how the circle formed itself — no one was refused in the applications. As if the circle was there before we began, and would continue after we left. Working with healing practitioners.
The infinite power of storytelling in the whole shebang of what it means to be human. Living in the gift, a culture of giving and receiving. And practising being receptive.
Trusting in the process. That it unfolds what is. From the beginning we long for our co-midwives, who cannot join us because of their full-time work. We feel starkly white. And this shows in our circle — no matter how diverse, the gifts of different races, languages, worldviews, economies, education, experiences, spiritualities — the need for in-depth white work on privilege is so glaringly obvious... and never-ending.
In the weft and the weave of our days together, come Aura core themes. Breathing, playing, gardening.
Playing, making and crafting transports us into creativity, where the feminine seems most joyful, and filled with laughter. In the quiet of planting and gardening, it seems we too may garden our hearts and minds. Seasons of growing, fertility, fruiting and dying, can bring a realisation of cycles within our own psyches. As we are nature, connecting with natural growing cycles may help us find quiet acceptance of our own rhythms.
Of birth, living, loving, loss, dying and death.
There are images that remain vivid. Gaggles of women sewing, making clay, painting and drawing. Someone who had never encountered a sauna, nor who knew how to swim, overjoyed in her own courage, carefully holding onto the stairs as she immerses herself in deep water. Again and again. A woman swimming in the icy lake at midnight with a glimmer of the moon. A grandmother being primary carer for ten grandchildren. Two women praying at the labyrinth. Women who arrived stiff and sore from endless sitting in meetings, unfreezing and unfolding — amazed at their own beloved bodies waking up. One of us is heavily pregnant with an infant girl-child. The exceptional skill of someone who — after a hard conversation grappling with issues of whiteness — knew to lovingly gather each woman in a circle of dancing and singing ancient isiXhosa songs, together around the night fire.
She helped us sing as if our hearts depended on it, singing us over the rawness. Singing us home. With some not knowing the exquisite words, we all knew to dance, and to sing as a form of prayer into peace. Our tears run freely.
We know that expanding consciousness may well come through psychedelics and plant medicine — but we choose simple breathwork. Deceptively simple.
As if Bodhi Khaya had its own message for us, amidst our breathwork arrives a troop of baboons. Quietly, down from the forested mountain, into the clearing around the meditation room. Moving only when they see us emerging, as if from deep underground caves of connection. We smile. How is it that psychedelics may indeed provide extraordinary visual journeys — yet our breathwork brings a real live band of baboons?
Returning home, we have found again a minor, almost invisible gesture in Midwifing the Feminine. Challenging the status quo very simply: through women connecting, beauty, liminal space, potency, shifting perception. Opening space for the new, and letting go of tired, old habits.
Finding other ways of knowing, doing and a soft poetics of being.
In gratitude,
Eve Annecke and Renata Minerbo
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